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PROMO Ancient Chinese Oracle Bones and other Ancient Writing - Ep 98
1.2k Plays1 year ago
We had some interviews fall through this week so we’re presenting you with an episode of The Archaeology Show. We think it’s mostly relevant but either way we hope you like it. Here’s the show description:
We're taking a deep dive on ancient writing on this episode! After talking about the recent deciphering of Linear Elamite on the last episode we just wanted more. We'll talk about what writing means and mention other undeciphered languages. In the last two segments we'll talk about first written scripts in China and Mesoamerica. And for members, we've got a cool bonus segment about a curious artifact found in Mexico in the 1990s.
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Transcript
Introduction and Format Shift
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hey, everybody. It's Chris Webster here for the Rock Art Podcast. Well, this week we had a bunch of things just not work out right, and we had a couple of interview schedules fall through at the last minute. So instead of not bringing you any shows at all, we're going to bring you another show from the Archeology Podcast Network. And this is one of the ones that I host. I actually host it with my wife, Rachel. We're both archaeologists, of course, and it's called The Archeology Show.
00:00:53
Speaker
We release it every Sunday morning, and we usually talk about three news articles that are current, and sometimes they're themed, like the episode you're gonna hear in a minute. This one we called Ancient Chinese Oracle Bones and Other Ancient Writing. I figured for a podcast that's dedicated to what's essentially ancient writing, we just may not be able to read it sometimes, this would be a good episode to put on this feed. So, hope you enjoy it, and if you want to learn more, go to arkpodnet.com forward slash archaeology,
00:01:19
Speaker
and you can learn more about the archaeology show or just type in the archaeology show in your current podcast player and you can subscribe to it there. Thanks a lot and here's the show.
Journey to Glacier National Park
00:01:30
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, Episode 184. On today's show, we talk about the origin of language in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. Let's dig a little deeper into the logographic representation of this show. What picture would represent this show? I don't know. Probably just chaos. Oh, I don't know. Like a trial, maybe? A trial. That's stupid. Let's find out.
00:01:57
Speaker
Welcome, everybody, to The Archaeology Show. How's it going? Pretty good. We're here at Glacier Meadow RV Park, which is not near a glacier, but it is near our meadow. No, it is. Those mountains right over there. Right, but I can't see any glaciers from my RV. That's Glacier National Park. On the other side of those mountains, you'd probably see some glaciers. Right, but I can't see any here. No, no. I think it's misnamed.
00:02:22
Speaker
Either way, yeah, we're just at the south side of Glacier National Park. We're headed into the park today after this recording, actually, and we're gonna stay there for about a week, so maybe we'll get some history up there at the visitor's house. I know, I'm so excited because, so at first we weren't sure we were gonna be able to get a camping spot in the park because we just don't plan far enough ahead to be with all the people sitting at their computers six months ago to grab these spots. So what I did is I booked us a tour, because you can only get in the park if you have like a reservation or a tour,
00:02:50
Speaker
vehicle reservation and all that stuff is booked out. So I booked us a tour because it was available and it's with a Native American, a member of the Blackfeet tribe up here in Montana and they're going to do a Glacier National Park, like Native American spin on, on a tour of the area. So we're really excited about that. We'll probably have a little bit of, of not really a review so much as of what our experience was like in our next episode, hopefully.
00:03:15
Speaker
It sounds like an episode writing itself. I would venture to say the writing is on the wall for that
Ancient Writing Systems: An Overview
00:03:20
Speaker
one. You know where else the writing is on the wall? Oh my god. Pretty much. I don't know why I didn't see where you were going with that. Pretty much all over the ancient world.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, we're going to do a deep dive, because on our last episode, if you heard that, one of our articles was about the recent potential decipherment, if that is a word. Translation? Oh yeah, translation. But deciphering, once you decipher and you understand, then you translate, I feel like. Yes, that's true, because they have not fully translated.
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Sure, sure. So you got to understand what the symbols mean before you can translate. So go with the made up decipherment word. So the decipherment of linear elements, TAS 183, we'll have a link to that in the show notes, or it's just like the last episode that we recorded. Yeah. Yeah. And it's still a third segment, I think. Yeah. Well, there's so much about ancient writing and we were both kind of wondering, well, what else hasn't been deciphered and what has writing developed and who's done what? And so we just kind of did a deep dive on that article and the whole topic of ancient writing for this episode.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think both of us have always found the study of languages or linguistics super interesting, but also like really complicated. And there's just a lot of different paths that language has taken in the different parts of the world. And I know when we were talking about that article last week, we're talking about it and I'm like, man, I really don't know anything about any of this stuff. I just have like that base knowledge of like,
00:04:46
Speaker
language started with the Sumerians and that was sort of where my knowledge ended. So it was really fun to deep dive this and find out the actual origins and where it happened, where it developed independently around the world.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm looking at what writing even means. Is writing symbols? Is it pictures? Is it taking multiple symbols and putting them together to form what we would now call words or concepts or something like that? Writing can mean different things to different people, and if you understand the meaning that's being conveyed,
00:05:17
Speaker
then, well, I would venture to say that's writing like rock art. We don't understand a lot of what the pictographic representations of rock art mean because we're not in the mind of the ancient peoples that produced it. But were they just symbols for, you know, ancient hunting magic, which people always say or something like that, or could they have actually conveyed messages? Could they have said, you know, this is what's going on here, you know, beware or something like that or whatever?
00:05:44
Speaker
I mean, there's a fair amount of rock art in this world and you just can't assume that all of it is related to sacred things and ritual. And I imagine some of it must have just been like basic communication. Like, Hey, Hey, we found a lot of Buffalo here, you know, go here to find more Buffalo or whatever, you know, it could have been, but also the, the rarity of rock art, because while there is a lot of rock art in the world, it's relatively rare compared to the number of places that could be right. And it's also.
00:06:14
Speaker
I wouldn't say difficult to create, but it's time consuming. And you have to have kind of a head for it. And to be honest, one of the things I love about looking at rock art, especially the ones that are supposed to represent animals and stuff, I'm like, oh yeah, that's definitely how I would draw a buffalo. Like stick figure buffalo man, that's exactly what I would do.
00:06:37
Speaker
No, so that linear element, again, it might prove to be one of the oldest written language that is based on syllables, so independent pieces that represent words. And some of the earliest forms of writing include what's called logograms, which is using pictures to represent words. So if you have a
00:06:54
Speaker
like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. If you've got a picture of a bird, it probably means something related to a bird, you know, something like that. Overall, I don't know if hieroglyphics directly translates to stuff like that, but they did use pictures of things to represent other things. Yeah, I think it was a little bit of both, too. A lot of these languages used the logograms, which were the pictures, and then they also
00:07:16
Speaker
would have images that represented sounds that you could put together into words basically. A lot of these ancient languages included both types of things going on. And you know, as I'm reading kind of our next note here, we're going to have to deep dive the Phoenicians at some point. Yeah, they're pretty cool, right? We owe a lot to them, to the modern world, right? Right. Because the first fully formed
00:07:37
Speaker
phonetic alphabet, we'll get back to that word, is thought to have come from the use of Phoenician traders around 1100 BCE, which makes sense because they were trading all over the Mediterranean. Yeah. They had to communicate. You know, when you're dealing with contracts and purchases and things like that, you just need a common frame of reference and it would make sense that they would help to promote or develop that kind of thing based on stuff that they'd seen so people would understand. And if you want to trade with the Phoenicians, you're probably going to have to learn their language.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And I mean, of course there's the verbal language, which I feel like that was probably pretty easy for people to pick up and share when you're just verbally trying to communicate with somebody. But when you talk about trading and you know, all of the things that go along with that and trust in people, you need to have proof of what you're trading or what you agreed to do. And that's where the written language part came in. I'm sure that in order to believe in trust and the people that you're trading with, they had to figure out a way to write down the things that they were doing.
00:08:33
Speaker
Right. And why I said we'd get back to the word phonetic, it just looks like it's a derivative of the word Phoenician, like their phonetic alphabet would have been the Phoenician alphabet. But I honestly don't know if that's just a coincidence in terms. No, I don't think it is. I think it is because it was the first one came from the Phoenician, so that's where that word comes from. Well, when we deep dive to Phoenicians, we'll find out. I know, right?
00:08:56
Speaker
Anyway, one of the other cool things about writing and looking at this whole topic is I'm always concerned with origins. That's why I love about archaeology. Where did the first things come from? That's why when I first started getting into anthropology in college, my first love was paleoanthropology. And if Arizona State hadn't been such jerks and not admitted me.
00:09:16
Speaker
me and the other 8,000 people that applied that year. You don't have to apply at least three times before you can have a chance of getting accepted. I just kind of gave up after the first year. Anyway, it's a long story, but I looked at the people that they actually brought in and they were looking for young. I was already 10 years older than most students. They were looking for young people with excellent GPAs until they got it. I had a decent GPA.
00:09:39
Speaker
I wasn't like a superstar standout student. And they kind of had to do that because they got so many applicants. They got hundreds and hundreds of applicants to their paleoanthropology program, their graduate program and PhD. And they take like four every year. That's stupid. So anyway, that's why they're a great school. But you do have a love of the topic. You always have. You did when I met you. You had just come back from working at Olduvai Gorge. So I know that you have a love for that.
00:10:05
Speaker
And I've been pestering you about this for years and I'm going to say it on the podcast now because it's going to make it real. I'll edit it out. No, you're not editing this one. I am. But I really want to do a paleo anthropology focused, maybe a couple of episodes or whatever it takes for us to cover. I'd love to do a whole podcast. I know you would love to do a whole podcast. We don't have the bandwidth for a whole new podcast right now. If you're listening to this show,
00:10:29
Speaker
And you are a paleoanthropologist, but you're in this space, we'll give you a show. We have the space, you just have to record. Yeah, you can even have a built-in co-host in you, because you just want to get on there and talk about it. But anyway, for TAS, for our show, I really do want you to do us a deep dive episode on it. So all right, if anybody else wants to hear that, write into chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and tell them how much you want to hear that, because I don't really have the skill set for that, but you definitely do.
00:10:58
Speaker
That's right. All right. So regarding first things, just a really quick overview here. It seems like according to some research that writing systems have been developed independently at least four times in human history. And it's more than likely a lot more. Like boiling it down to four is being pretty simple about it because within those four, it was probably multiple independent times
Cuneiform: The Foundation of Mesopotamian Writing
00:11:20
Speaker
as well.
00:11:20
Speaker
It could have been. Yeah. And also there's other writings, which we'll talk about later that, you know, they could have developed a long time ago, but it's on materials we simply don't have any evidence for anymore. Yeah. Perishable materials. I know. It's so, so crazy that missing majority thing. I know we've talked about that before, but when you write on wood or silk or bamboo or whatever, which I, it will come up a lot when we talk about Asia, that, that stuff is just gone. It doesn't last through time. It just degrades. So yeah.
00:11:49
Speaker
So, some of the earliest ones, again, these independently developed ones that we know about, Mesopotamia, they used cuneiform between 3400 and 3300 BCE, and then 1300 BCE, the Shang Dynasty in China, between 900 and 600 BCE, some cultures of Mesoamerica, and I say some cultures because there was kind of like a lot of independent writing down there.
00:12:12
Speaker
And then others like the Indus River Valley and Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island. But again, these remain undeciphered. And when they remain undeciphered and somewhat chaotic in some cases, like they're just symbols on a thing. It's like, is this a language or is this just symbolic representation of something which may or may not be an actual written language?
00:12:32
Speaker
Yeah, I found this when I was researching Asian languages actually, but there's a really early like language in big quotation marks, which is just like a series of symbols and people are like, well, is it a language or is it just like what you would use to sign a document if you didn't have a written language, kind of like putting an X if you didn't know how to sign your name. So you have to be really careful to distinguish between that sort of thing, which is totally valid, but it's not quite a language.
00:13:00
Speaker
and then actual real languages that were used for making sentences and communicating. That's how languages develop, though. It is. They start with that, right? If the symbol wedge shape with a cross on the top of it means grog, grog made this, then that becomes the word grog at some point, and you just kind of associate it with that.
00:13:21
Speaker
Then if you make something that's grog-like, you need a symbol for like. Maybe it's the grog symbol with a circle around it. Right. Oh, you just developed a language. Look at that. Look at that. I know. I'll talk to James Cameron. Oh my God.
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, so a little bit of a refresher on some of these. Again, Kinea Form, about 2,900 BCE, give or take. We said 3,400 to 3,300 was the development. I think that was origins of it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the origins of Kinea Form in 3,400 and 3,300. Yeah. But like the kind of the height of it was the Sumerians, what is now in present day Iraq. Again, another people that just like gave us so much that we have today.
00:13:59
Speaker
Anyway, they were making the wedge-shaped marks in wet clay with a reed, and again, that's known as cuneiform. But the interesting thing is, again, the development of this stuff. You've got people very tediously going, pluck, pluck, pluck, pluck. They're doing these things, and they're like, this has got to be quicker. Or you just get somebody that's a little sloppy with it.
00:14:17
Speaker
right? Or maybe the clay was too wet and it just kind of rolled together. Yeah. And I've seen some images of it too. And I like, can't even imagine how they were able to decipher that because it all looks the same to me like that. It's not like some of the other languages that are like really distinct symbols that are, it's obvious to see that somebody was communicating something specific here. Those read
00:14:38
Speaker
punctures kind of are just, they're very hard to see what they could be saying. And again, it's like wet clay, like with the clays too, they could just fall in on itself. But anyway, so the reeds have kind of an elliptical shape to them, like a boomerang shape. Yeah. And
00:14:55
Speaker
Over time, those curves were sort of eliminated. Probably they used different materials to make the symbols. They realized that, hey, we can make this naturally with this, but that's kind of hard to find and come by and maintain. So let's make them with these. And so the signs were simplified and then the direct connection between the look of some of the pictograms and the original object reference was lost, which means that maybe something like, again, using hieroglyphs looked like a bird, but the fact that it means bird was lost.
00:15:20
Speaker
That kind of thing, right? Because the shape changed kind of away from a bird, not quite the same with cuneiform, but easy to understand example. And also during this period, the writing was read from top to bottom and then shifted from left to right in horizontal lines, which is how we read today, like how English is read anyway. And in a lot of languages are read. But also the symbols because of that were
00:15:46
Speaker
sort of realigned again through time and then rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, which seems like a pretty big shift. That's so crazy how that developed. I almost can't picture it. I know. The cool thing is the last datable document in cuneiform is an astronomical text from 75 AD because it became more of a, as people were using other languages, it became more of a clerical or sort of
00:16:11
Speaker
I don't know, I don't want to say scientific elite, but a language that wasn't used by very many people. Yeah, yeah. And it was the basis for a lot of other languages that kind of developed out of that region too, right? Yeah. And I kind of feel like by 75 AD, it was kind of like Latin is today. Yeah, exactly. Nobody speaks Latin, but we still use it in scientific contexts and things like that. Right. It's the root of a lot of words that we use today in all of our different languages. Well, and even some services like Catholic services are still done in Latin. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker
In Egypt, the writing can date back to about 3250 BCE and rock inscriptions again. And they were like huge symbols on rock and they resemble what became hieroglyphs. So again, pictures that become basically words to represent what these things are. Some of those images on those really early ones were over a meter high.
00:16:59
Speaker
And they were influenced by cuneiform as well, right? Like it had kind of like bled over a little bit, and that helped develop the Egyptian hieroglyphs language as well. I mean, they weren't that far away, to be honest. The first writing in ink using reed brushes, again reeds, just like dominating here, was found in Egypt, which is kind of cool. And it was known by the Greek term hieratic, which is a priestly script. Essentially, it's like cursive hieroglyphics. Right, right.
Chinese Writing: From Oracle Bones to Scripts
00:17:26
Speaker
The earliest Chinese writing, which we're going to deep dive here in the next segment, was 1300 to 1050 BCE from the Shang Dynasty. And again, the Mesoamerican systems, there was actually a number of them developed anywhere around 900 BCE or so. Probably not all at the same time, of course.
00:17:43
Speaker
They had what I guess linguists would call open systems and closed systems of writing. Open systems of writing are not linked to grammatical and sound structures of specific languages, which from what I understood from that basically means that it's a system of writing that's a little bit more understandable by other groups around you. Like images that make sense to everybody? Kind of. Yeah. And then there's closed systems where the sound and grammatical structures are tied to specific languages.
00:18:13
Speaker
So just different forms of communication, basically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There was only four closed system Maya books, closed systems writing Maya books that survived from pre-colonial period. And then fewer than 20 overall survive at all. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Yeah, we will. Yeah.
00:18:30
Speaker
And then finally, some of the big, undeciphered scripts in the world are Vinca, which is old European, Indus, or Harappa script, Proto-Elamite, and Old Elamite, which is like linear Elamite, which is what we talked about. That one's pretty much done. But lists aren't correcting that yet.
00:18:48
Speaker
Well, because it's still debated whether or not it's actually done. Plus, they're not going to update all these articles. It's like that deciphered versus translated thing you're talking about. They might have deciphered it, and they definitely haven't fully translated things. Right. And then we've got Linear A, the face-dose disk, which is kind of cool, the Voynich manuscript, the Rohan Codex, and Rongorongo. Wow. Yeah. I really want to learn Rongorongo. I'm going to see if that's on Google. I don't think it is. I don't think it is. Yeah.
00:19:18
Speaker
So many undeciphered languages, that's crazy. I wonder if it's lack of resources to learn from or if it's just so complicated that it just isn't something that we've been able to decipher yet. Well, I don't know about you, but let's try to answer that question with some ancient Chinese wisdom back in a minute.
00:19:38
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 184. We're talking about ancient writing, and we talked in general about a bunch in the last segment, but now we're going to focus on a couple for the following two segments with a bonus, too. Don't forget to listen to the bonus segment. I know, I'm excited about the bonus, but we decided to do Ancient Chinese and then the Mayan script for our next two segments, and I think we decided to do that because
00:20:04
Speaker
the Sumerian language, cuneiform, and then also Egyptian hieroglyphics, it just kind of seems like those have gotten more play. And like people have heard of those, right? People know what they look like. You can envision those Egyptian hieroglyphics if you think about it because of movies and pop culture and stuff like that. So I didn't know as much about the Chinese languages and then the Mayan script. So we figured let's do those because they're less known to us. So that'll be more interesting, more fun. Right, right.
00:20:31
Speaker
So the ancient Chinese script, there's some disagreement among experts, obviously, because they're always... There's always disagreement among experts. There's always just disagreement. But generally the accepted beginnings of writing in China occur during the Shang dynasty from 1600 to 1046 BCE. That year range is what the Shang dynasty range is. And so it developed sometime during that dynasty.
00:20:57
Speaker
And it is like we mentioned in the first segment, it's really hard to know because of this whole missing majority thing where we don't have any examples of the perishable material that they were writing on like the wood, bamboo and silk. And we know that they use those materials a lot in China.
00:21:12
Speaker
It seems incomprehensible to me that something even called a dynasty, a government, that is in charge of so many people could actually do that without some form of tracking. Yeah, they had to. They had to develop something, right? Because they had to keep track of the people. But that also tells me this wasn't the first Chinese dynasty.
00:21:32
Speaker
Right? There must have been stuff before that. We just don't have examples of it. Yeah. Well, like we mentioned in the first segment, there's some early pottery shirts that date to like 4,500 to 3,750 BCE. They have markings on them. They've identified like 20 or so different markings.
00:21:52
Speaker
But most people believe that those are like markings of ownership rather than language. Like we were saying an X as your signature kind of a situation. But like you said, I mean, that could have been the beginnings of a language and that was 4,000 years ago or 4,500.
00:22:09
Speaker
symbols of ownership still mean that person has a name that they're called by. And that symbol becomes the physical representation of that sound of what that person was called by. So if I draw a trowel and that means Chris, then trowel becomes the syllable Chris. And that's what that ends up being.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's talk about one of the coolest things that we came across in our research, the oracle bones. So for many centuries, fragments of bones were found by farmers and then sold and used for Chinese medicine as dragon bones. They kind of still are.
00:22:52
Speaker
Yeah, they probably still are because there's a lot of mystical stuff that goes on in that part of the world. But it wasn't until 1899 that scholar Wang Yurong recognized the characters carved into the surface of some of these bones as early writing. And that kind of snowballed into like, well, what is this early writing? What were they doing? Why is it carved into bones? And, you know, they have answered some of those questions.
00:23:15
Speaker
And these oracle bones were generally used, I mean, it wasn't just any old bone. No, it had to be big enough, right? Yeah, generally like the shoulder blades of oxen, which I can imagine are just huge encyclopedias. Yeah, just so you can put a lot on there. Right. And then also plastron of turtles. And plastron is, if I'm not mistaken, the under shell. Yeah, that flat part. Yeah, because the underside of a turtle is also a shell. A little softer than the harder outer shell that you already know.
00:23:43
Speaker
We used to find those down in Miami, all the turtle bones. So the way it happened is that someone would want to know the future. Knowing the future was really, really important to Chinese culture and they thought they could know the future. It's important to everybody. Some people just think they can figure it out.
00:24:04
Speaker
So they would go to these diviner guys, basically an ancient psychic, and the diviner would carve their question, whatever it might be, into a bone and then heat that bone up. When the bone cracks, the lines that formed would be how they interpreted the answer to the question.
00:24:23
Speaker
So like if the king wants to go hunting tomorrow, they'd go, he'd go to the diviner, say, should I go hunting tomorrow? And then the way the bone cracks, he would decide whether or not to actually go hunting. And I guess a lot righted on the diviner's answer because like if he did go hunting and then like didn't catch anything, that would be really bad for the diviner because he was supposed to be able to catch something. So basically ancient Chinese magic eight ball.
00:24:48
Speaker
I bet things went really bad for designers sometimes when they were wrong because you know it is still just guessing. But so the oracle bones were used like this by everybody low high class everybody was going to see these guys all throughout the Shang dynasty and into the next one the Zhao dynasty where it was replaced by the I Ching.
00:25:11
Speaker
And just really quickly, the I Ching, it's another form of divination, and it does involve writing a little bit. It's a written text of hexagrams that was used to interpret the meaning of a pattern made by the person who is asking the question, and they throw these yarrow sticks onto the table, and then the diviner interprets what the arrangement of them means using that hexagram thing. So, yeah. Sounds like those diviners kind of make up the rules and everybody else had to listen to them. I know, totally, right?
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, so that was how the oracle bones and all the stuff for divination seems to have had a great influence on the roots of language, right? Also for governing these larger cities that were starting to develop too. Like you said, they had to have a way to keep control of the government and the people and everything. So all that seemed to kind of influence it. But there is a very specific evolution of the different scripts in China.
00:26:05
Speaker
The first one is Jiguan and it dates to 1600 BCE to 1000 BCE. It's mostly pictographic and it relied on images to represent the question or idea. And there's like 2,500 to 3,000 characters in that language. So many characters, right?
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah. Then the next one was, we're going to butcher all these words, by the way. I know. We'll do our best here. Yeah. DeJuan, which was 1100 to 700 BCE. And that was known as the greater seal script, which was also pictographic, but it had a lot more defined characters. Which is crazy to have even more than 3000 characters, but... Yeah. I don't know how you learn all those. I know, right? Yeah.
00:26:46
Speaker
So then after that comes the Jiswan, which dates to about 700 BCE, and it's known as the Lesser Sales Script. Now this one was getting more logographic, so the symbols represented concepts, not objects so much like they did in the past.
00:27:03
Speaker
And this one is actually technically still in use today, so... That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Then you had Li Shu, which was from 500 BCE to 220 CE. And this one was known as the Clerky Script, which I'm not sure what's going on there. I know, it's such a fun name. Yeah. It was used during the Qin and Han dynasties and developed to help document government affairs. And it's also logographic, so picture-based.
00:27:26
Speaker
That one, I think, is what the language as it is today. Well, not really today, because the Chinese language has really developed a lot. But the characteristic that you can think of when you think of Chinese language, they developed out of this. This makes me wonder how you develop new words in this language today.
00:27:44
Speaker
like what is the word for internet you know what I mean like how do you just yeah I don't know I don't understand it I know it is hard to understand and the Chinese language is really really unique we'll get to that in a minute here but so
00:28:00
Speaker
The language that they're developing here though, it's not just for government and some of the most beautiful like artistic expression came out of this language. We've got poetry and prose and it just, it was really a language of art. And part of that is because it was also a language for the elite too. So it wasn't really used by everyday people until like the mid 20th century when it got a little bit more standardized and easier for people, everybody to learn.
00:28:27
Speaker
it was more of an elite language and artistic language. And part of that is because unlike the rest of the world, the dominant script, it remained logographic rather than moving into phonetic, which is what most of the other dominant languages of the world are based on. And I thought this was so interesting, but it's in part because the spoken language, spoken Chinese language has so many words that sound the same.
00:28:55
Speaker
And it's like your inflection makes them different words, right? That phonetic would be really, really difficult because they look the same on paper without knowing what that inflection means. So they need the logographic type of language to add that inflection basically so that you understand what word it is that is meant when you write it down. Cause you can add a little tick here or a symbol there. Exactly. Yeah. I thought that was so cool and it's really just like the genius of
00:29:21
Speaker
these people who develop these written languages to figure out how to make it work, you know? Well, and we can see that problem, too, in our own language. English, you know, for most people listening to this, obviously you're listening to it in English. Right.
The Influence of Chinese Script on Asia
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah. And like we have this problem driving the RV all the time because the word truck.
00:29:39
Speaker
Now, this isn't an inflection thing. It's more of a context thing. But it's a similar idea, right? If truck were spelled with a little bit of a doopie-doo on the U or something like that or the K to symbolize that, hey, we mean automobile truck or we mean semi-truck? We mean semi-truck, yeah. We mean delivery truck or commercial truck, I should say.
00:30:00
Speaker
Because every time we see, you know, truck parking or something like that, or truck wash, it's like, okay, we can probably take our RV through there. But then you go across a border and it's like, trucks go here. Well, okay, we weigh 26,000 pounds and we're 36 feet long. Are we a truck? Yeah. What do you guys count as truck? And then, and then weigh station's always like, I mean, I know I'm not supposed to go through a weigh station because I'm not commercial, but it does say trucks this way. It does. And when we went into Canada, we were like, well does, what is Canada considered truck? Yeah, truck in Canada. Yeah. Yeah. It's stupid.
00:30:29
Speaker
So a little doopie doo, like you said, would be a perfect way to distinguish that. Anybody listening from any DOT right now, truck does not mean all trucks. Right. Because there are pickup trucks. There are, oh, you know, where do RVs fit in? Yeah. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Fix your language.
00:30:46
Speaker
Anyway, these languages of China were so complex and difficult to master. They were, you know, often the language of the elite. Yeah, it remained the language of the elite. Like I said, until the mid 20th century, I think it was Mao Zedong who, you know, with communism,
00:31:02
Speaker
They wanted all people to be able to read and write. So they really pushed the language that everybody could understand and learn. But until that point, it was such a class separator thing, right? And the more valuable members of society could read and write. And it was just, it really increased class division. And it's just an integral part of Chinese society until communism came along. So really crazy how much that influenced the whole society.
00:31:30
Speaker
And like many things in this world, trade and probably exploration and things like that help to spread this language out to neighboring regions, the greater Chinese empire, so to speak.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah. And kind of the reason why to our Western eyes, the Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other Asian scripts look kind of similar to Chinese. It's because they were back how many thousands of years ago they were adopted from the Chinese script originally because it was the first one. And then it sort of spread out to these other Asian countries through traders and such. So yeah.
00:32:05
Speaker
interesting thing about Japanese, because I really don't know a whole lot about Chinese other than what we just studied. I took two years of Japanese in high school, and Japanese has three written languages right now. They all sound the same when you're talking, but three written languages. They've got Kanji, which is their more logographic script, more pictographic.
00:32:25
Speaker
And it's not really pictures anymore. It is symbols that represent concepts though. So that was kanji. They've got hiragana, which is their more syllabic version of that for Japanese words. And then there's katakana, which is also a syllabic language, but used exclusively for foreign words. So like the word hamburger is written in katakana because it's not traditionally a Japanese word. Do they mesh all these together? Like if you're saying, I want to go eat a hamburger at the restaurant,
00:32:54
Speaker
You could have three written systems in the same sentence. Wow, that is so complicated. Oh my gosh, language is just fascinating. But they are distinctly different. Like kanji is like square symbols really. And then the difference between hiragana and katakana is pretty striking if you know what you're looking for. So you would know just looking at it, even if you didn't know what the katakana word was, you would know it was a foreign word.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah. That's so cool. I had no idea. Yeah, it's crazy. So you know what else we don't have any idea about? Much of Mesoamerican in my inscript.
00:33:30
Speaker
Well, the one we're going to talk about we know a little bit about. A little bit about it. But it's all just like big faces and teeth. Let's see if we can decide for that. Back in a minute.
Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Complexity and Survival
00:33:38
Speaker
Welcome back to the final segment of episode 184 of the archaeology show. And we're talking about Mesoamerican and Mayan script this time. And there are 15 distinct writing systems that have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
00:33:52
Speaker
Yep, that is a lot of different scripts. And there's probably more. Yeah, probably. And probably some of the ones that we think are in one category could actually be moved into another category because it's all very complicated. And much like some girlfriends I've had, they're hard to date. You want to know something crazy? What? You've only been in one relationship where you haven't broken up.
00:34:15
Speaker
That is an interesting statistic. Where did we hear that? I was on some TV show. Have you ever been in a relationship that didn't end in failure? Only the one. So far going good.
00:34:27
Speaker
Well, have you ever seen a writing system that didn't end in failure? Well, I mean, all the ones before this did. Well... All the ones before the one you're using now. I'm not sure I would say failure though. They just evolve into something new, right? Exactly. But these Mesoamerican systems are, like I said, they're difficult to date and it's difficult to say which came first.
00:34:46
Speaker
I think at some point we'll probably figure some of it out, because there's really smart people out there, and languages do evolve from not only the language itself, and it changes through time, sometimes just from people getting lazy and saying, I don't want to draw higher graphics anymore and scripting it out, and sometimes just from a natural evolution and adding of things.
00:35:07
Speaker
as these reach out to other regions and they combine and things like that, you can kind of work back to the differences. Yeah, totally. So we definitely have a couple that are known to be some of the oldest, even though we don't really know which one is first. That would be the Olmec hieroglyphs, the Zapotec script and the Ismian script. And we know that there's some of the oldest because those cultures are some of the oldest in the Mesoamerica area. So that's how we know that.
00:35:37
Speaker
And we know some really cool things about Olmec specifically, which we will come back to that at the end of the segment and we'll go into it in the bonus segments. You gotta be a member to hear that. But so the Mayan script, of course, is the most extensive and the best, best known of the Mesoamerican scripts.
00:35:55
Speaker
Yeah. The earliest examples of that date back to just 200 to 300 BCE, which is really interesting and tells you a little something about state society formation and stuff like that. Because, you know, back in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, those areas, they were forming into state societies a few thousand years before this. And when you have that many people and that much governance taking place in China too.
00:36:19
Speaker
When you have that many people and the need to govern and control, I mean, you have to develop some kind of system of writing. And this just tells you that while there were people here, you know, up to, I mean, we know at least 10 to 15,000 years ago,
00:36:35
Speaker
It could be a lot longer and they just didn't really need it. Yeah, they just didn't group up into these larger societies and it means that the language development was just a little bit slower and that's just what we know about the new world cultures. Like all inventions, you invent what you need at the time and if they didn't need it, they didn't need it. Yeah, totally.
00:36:55
Speaker
So the Mayan script uses both logograms and symbols and so far there's been 700 different glyphs documented and about 75% of them have been deciphered. So that's pretty good. Pretty good odds right there. They were widely used across the area occupied by the Mayans and also across the entire time period too.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, you would find these on altars, stelae, elements of architectural sculpture, and especially around like doorways and stairs, which tells me there was probably a little bit of mysticism and maybe even identification going on, like this is my house. Yes, yeah, totally. I think that was definitely happening. They could also be found painted or inscribed on pottery. And there's even examples of them being painted on cave walls and sometimes on the interior walls of buildings.
00:37:45
Speaker
Those are much less common though. The walls in particular, I think because the walls like fall down over time or the plaster that they were painting them on is, is gone. So, you know, we just don't have a lot of examples of that, but can you imagine what one of those buildings would have looked like in the time just like covered in these beautiful painted glyphs communicating whatever it was that they were communicating? I think that would have been so cool to see.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, it might not even have been communication necessarily, but dedication, recitation of a battle, or the reign of an emperor or something like that. That seems like what that kind of stuff was. There were shorter inscriptions as well, sometimes found on individual artifacts of like jade, greenstone, shell and bone, small things like that. Yeah, they would carve this stuff anywhere.
00:38:31
Speaker
We do it now. I think the smallest thing ever written from what I remember was, uh, it was a whole bunch of stuff, like an entire something or other written with like a scanning electron microscope on a piece of rice or something. I was just going to say, so I don't know if these are still popular, but like when I was a teenager in the late nineties, early 2000s timeframe, there was these little rice necklaces you could get and it would be like something, maybe just your name or whatever inscribed on a piece of rice in this little like bottle thing that you would wear on your neck.
00:39:00
Speaker
It probably just said, you're a douchebag. Cause nobody could read it. He probably did. He should have said that for sure. It's like, thanks for your money, sucka. That's what I'd write on it. That's like, I'm going to get you a rice named pellet and also I'm going to name a star after you. Oh, so sweet. Okay. So this is my favorite thing about the Mayans because we haven't, we didn't talk about this much in the development of other writing systems, but the Mayans actually had books. Yeah.
00:39:30
Speaker
They had screenfold volumes written on bark paper, typically in red and black ink. And these volumes mostly replace the inscriptions actually on the monuments by the 9th century CE. How did they save their place when they're reading those books that are written on paper?
00:39:48
Speaker
I think they would dog-ear the pages. Oh no! You're so stupid. That must be where that comes from. Oh, you think so, huh? I mean, if you're on bark paper, you have to dog-ear the pages. So dumb. Stop.
00:40:06
Speaker
We've only found three books and three that have survived the tropical climate and also zealous Spanish priests. Apparently when the conquest was happening, they would just burn them every time they found them to get rid of the books of the heathens or whatever, which is just insane.
00:40:24
Speaker
People always talk about like, what would you do if you go back in time? I'd kill Hitler, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Sure. That would help. Right. But also just like teach somebody in religion a thousand years ago, that burning books is probably not a great idea. Yeah. And like, you should preserve cultures and learn from them and try to work with them rather than just stamping them out violently. Like that's not going to be good for anybody.
00:40:48
Speaker
I mean, they burn these things because they don't want people going back to their old ways, so to speak. But also, it could also be argued that if you leave them around, they would see, I mean, thinking from the perspective of the priest, they might see that their old ways were savage and disorganized compared to the new way. But if you take that away, then they don't know what they had before, historically, a couple of generations down.
00:41:13
Speaker
and they might just go back to it. You know, who knows? It's so short-sighted too, because like half of the Christian holidays developed from pagan holidays, but like, you know, at a certain point, they just sort of forget that association with the pagan holidays. And no, no, no, these are totally Christian holidays. And if the fact that they can't look at the Mayan people and see that the same development could have happened is crazy, but that's just, that's how zealots go. So.
00:41:39
Speaker
Anyway, back to the script. They have some literal representations of real objects, much like hieroglyphics and other things like that, which totally makes sense how writing would form. You see a thing, you want to represent that concept of that thing to another person, you draw the thing. The thing just becomes the language.
00:41:59
Speaker
And there are also symbols that refer to objects or actions. And this can be like adjectives, prepositions, plurals, numbers. Like they were able to get so much of their spoken language into these different symbols. I always forget prepositions. So that would be like, place the sacrificial head on the altar.
00:42:16
Speaker
It is anything an airplane can do to a cloud. Stupid. Over it, under it, through it, around it. On it? Yeah, so sacrifice the Virgin on the altar would have been a preposition that they would represent within. Except the Mayans didn't do that, so let's not be building.
00:42:36
Speaker
When I listened to the Dirt podcast where they talked about the movie, Apokolito, which I don't think was mine, actually. No, that was Aztec, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it was Aztec. It was right word, the Spanish. Well, according to Mel Gibson, they're all the same. Oh my God, let's take history lessons from Mel Gibson. That's a great idea.
00:42:53
Speaker
Anyway, so there were also, okay, let me just recap here because we keep derailing ourselves. We have images that are literal representations of objects. We also have symbols that refer to objects or actions. And then finally, we have phonetic glyphs that represent sounds like vowels or potentially the sound of a vowel in a consonant together.
00:43:17
Speaker
or even two consonants together, I'm thinking like the CH sound or something like that, if they had a similar kind of thing. So they created glyphs to represent those sounds. Very complex, right? I love it. Okay, so the way that Mayan script looks is that these signs and symbols were arranged into square blocks, right? Mostly square blocks.
00:43:38
Speaker
and they're in these columns with two blocks next to each other. And then there'd be a small space and then two more blocks and then a small space, two more blocks. And then it's columns of these things, right? However, the way you read it is it's from the top left horizontally, you go across two blocks and then you go down and you read the next two blocks. And then you go down and you read the next two blocks all the way down that column. And then you go back up to the top and then it's two blocks. And then you go down like that. Yeah, much like a newspaper.
00:44:06
Speaker
Yeah, kinda. I mean, it is. It's in columns, but there's only two blocks per column. It's so cool looking. I mean, I've seen it in like movies and images and stuff like that, but just looking at it from doing this research, the blocks themselves, they're so artistic. They're so beautiful and just so cool looking. I love it. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah.
00:44:27
Speaker
Yeah, much like writing systems across the world, only a small elite group of people could actually read and write. What I want to know is, you've got like stonemasons and stuff. I mean, sure there's the books and there were probably a lot more than we even know of if there's certain ones that are existing. They probably had them all the time, but again, it's a jungle environment. If it gets lost or forgotten, I mean, it'll probably just degrade pretty quickly in that environment. But either way,
00:44:54
Speaker
the inscriptions and stuff i wonder if the people who were the stonemasons and things that were creating these things even knew what they were doing or if they were just literally given a drawing right and saying recreate this yeah no no it could've been even you know in some of the societies that you weren't like allowed to even know the language yeah you know.
00:45:12
Speaker
It's interesting you say that and it's escaping me which one, which of these ancient languages that I researched in it, but they did have some like cleric type people didn't really understand the script. They were just copiers.
00:45:27
Speaker
Like they were just there to copy from one thing to another. Or like you're saying, maybe the Masons just had like an image that they were given and they were just meant to copy it and they didn't really understand how to read it or what, or how to form new, new inscriptions. Right. And that's happened. I mean, that's happened time and time again in pretty much every society because before there were copy machines, there were copy people.
00:45:49
Speaker
And the church is well known for that. That's why there's a lot of versions of Bible chapters. Because they were copied, they were translated into different languages, they were copied, copied, copied, and one clerk may have just been a little sloppy. Game of telephone. I know, it really is, right? And that's how changes happen and stuff like that. Yeah, totally.
00:46:13
Speaker
So the writing was considered sacred, we think, and most of the inscriptions seem to be like histories of both the real world and also their mythologies, dedicating buildings and monuments to specific gods, that kind of thing. So there was definitely a lot of the sacred realm around these inscriptions.
00:46:35
Speaker
but there was so many of them and they're on everything. I just can't imagine that there wasn't some like everyday stuff in there too, but maybe we just haven't gotten to the point where we understand that stuff yet. I don't know.
Bonus Episode Teaser: The Cascahol Block
00:46:46
Speaker
So that's pretty much the end of this episode, but like we said, there is a bonus episode. And if you're a member arc podnet.com forward slash members, if you're not, but if you're a member, just go to the ad free downloads page or click into Slack and you will see this.
00:47:01
Speaker
And I'm so excited about it. So I'll give you just like a little bit of teaser here. It's called the Cascahol block. And it's an early, early writing system, Olmec probably. It was discovered in Mexico and it represents some of the oldest Mesoamerican writing. And anyway, there's a whole crazy story about how they found it and how they have to separate it. So I'm really excited to talk about it. And you guys should totally go become members so you can hear all about it.
00:47:27
Speaker
Indeed, indeed. And by the way, I mentioned last time, as I was shaming Australia for not having any members of the Archeology Podcast Network, it turns out we do have one. We don't collect that kind of information from our members, so I didn't actually know. But thank you, Greg, for being a member of the Archeology Podcast Network. Yeah, and shame on you for just throwing stuff out there without doing your research first. Maybe sometimes it's just like, are people listening to this?
00:47:53
Speaker
Like two days after the episode, Greg comes into our Slack team and is like, Hey, sorry about that, Greg. So anyway, uh, if you're interested in becoming a member again, it's seven 99 a month. You get stuff like our bonus content and bonus content from other shows and you know, past recordings of live events that we do. And then also.
00:48:16
Speaker
Anything else we do related to religious membership, plus the Slack team, which is really cool. And there's some active people over there that are really having discussions at the end of a lot of different episodes from the Sierra Mark podcast, Archeotech, this show, and a few others. There's some really good discussions happening back there. So if you're interested in keeping that conversation going and seeing what other people think, also talking to people like us, the hosts, I just got to get Rachel back there.
00:48:40
Speaker
She never goes to Slack. I know, I'm on other Slack channels like all day long. I know. Like the idea of going to one more Slack. I mean, I hear you, I'm like 19 Slack teams. Slack's a lot, but it's such a great communication tool. It is, and it's free. And it's included with your membership. All right, well, with that, I think we will go explore Glacier National Park and hopefully have something to talk about on this show, especially after that tour that we're going to do on Tuesday. I'm excited for that.
00:49:08
Speaker
Yeah. All right. We'll see you guys later. Bye. Thanks for listening to the rock art podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:49:51
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.